The Suzhou Bookworm Festival kicks off today on March 13. Tickets are available at their website.
After putting a human face on the incredible journey that migrating barn swallows make from their wintering grounds in South Africa to their British breeding sites in 2009’s A Single Swallow, Horatio Clare celebrates modern seafaring life in his latest best-seller Down to the Sea in Ships – of Ageless Oceans and Modern Man.
With the consent of the world’s largest container shipping company, Maersk, Clare hitched a ride on a vessel journeying from Felixstowe, England, to Los Angeles via Asia. That trip brought him to Chinese shores for the first time.
“We felt pretty big when we went into most ports, but we were just a speck going up the Pearl River Delta,” he recalls.
Praising Yangjiang as a sailor’s favorite, Clare lauds Hong Kong as “incredible from a seafaring perspective. The approach is so dramatic and it’s just a chaos of ships. It seems amazing there aren’t collisions, but it’s really just good seamanship. Along with those in Shanghai, Hong Kong crane operators are famous as the quickest in the world.”
Traveling up the Taiwan Strait, he describes the Pacific Ocean as “monumental.” Seeing no other ships for days, he praises the experience for shifting his perspective.
“We think of the world as so small – it’s simple for one person in Yorkshire to talk to another in Shanghai – but actually the world is vast,” he says. “My captain said that, no matter how much you tell people, they will never understand how vast the oceans are. It’s a great comfort that even though we’ve messed up much of it, it’s still a big beautiful world.”
Following the initial voyage’s conclusion, Clare hopped aboard a second container ship traveling across the North Atlantic from Antwerp to Montreal.
“I had seen the top end of the business operate beautifully, so I wanted to see the opposite side,” he explains. “I deliberately chose a really old ship on a really old route in really bad weather.”
Unlike A Single Swallow, where his adventures mingling with colorful characters including emerald smugglers, slave laborers and international rugby players were at the forefront, Clare took pains to minimize his presence in Down to the Sea in Ships. “I wanted to step back and be the camera and microphone,” he says. “I wanted to understand their lives without interfering.”
While he expresses surprise at how technology-laden the ships have become, the book also encapsulates the isolation that’s been a seafaring norm for centuries.
“Even though you’re confined with other people, you’re properly isolated from the rest of the world,” he says. “Most seafarers don’t have access to the Internet, and you have very little idea of what’s happening at home. If you sink into thinking about your family, it can drive you crazy. The job requires you to be optimistic at all times, as the atmosphere aboard a ship is really important.”
Noting sadly that modern shipping can be viewed as a racial pyramid with Filipinos, Chinese and Vietnamese laborers at the bottom, Indians and Eastern Europeans officers in the middle and captains coming from Denmark and the Netherlands, Clare laughingly recalls how all these different groups spent their valuable time off when their ship anchored at Long Beach, California.
“The Danes went to Hooters, for obvious reasons – although they claimed it was for the chicken – and the Filipinos went to Walmart to buy cheap stuff they could send home,” he recalls. “We had just carried that same type of stuff to California in the first place. The historical irony is that, once upon a time, even the lowest member of a whaling ship would have a fraction in the share.”
Currently working on a book about nighttime workers in the UK, Clare’s travel schedule is restricted by his young family. However, he’s thrilled to come to China as part of the Bookworm International Literary Festival, and will meet with Chinese publishers in Shanghai.
It will be his first time in the city, but Clare is not far removed from Shanghai: his grandfather was among the Jews who migrated to Shanghai to escape persecution, and his father was born on these shores.
“I would love to see some of my family history and I also want to hang out in today’s modern Shanghai,” he says. “In a way that San Francisco and New York have generated the culture of the Western world, Shanghai is busy generating the culture of the next world.”
// Horatio Clare speaks at the Suzhou Bookworm Festival: Mar 18, 8pm, RMB50. The Bookworm, 77 Gunxiu Fang, by Shiquan Jie 十全街滚绣坊77号, 近十全街 (6581 6752)
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